Our colleague Mark Hulbert over at MarketWatch notes that Oct. 9 seems to be an oddly common date for turning points in the stock market. Both the 2002-2007 bull market, and the 2007-2009 bear market started on, you guessed it, Oct. 9 (happy anniversary, by the way). So, does this mean another turning point’s at hand? Today is, after all, Oct. 9.

Not necessarily. Hulbert writes:

You might think that there are almost impossibly low odds that two trend changes this momentous would occur on the very same day of the year.

But you’d be wrong. In fact, this is a great illustration of how our gut instincts are poor guides to statistical truths.

Several other dates have marked turning points as well, he notes, including Jan. 5, April 28, and Sept. 21. In fact, he says, the entire month of October is overblown as a big, trend-changing month. “Our minds love to find patterns, even when none exists. Be skeptical of any patterns that are urged upon you until and unless they can withstand statistical scrutiny.”

Okay, so the bull market may not be about to end. But are we even in a bull market?

It may seem a silly question, with the major indexes up more than 10% this year, and nearly double from their 2009 lows. But the reality is markets tend to play out in long, long trends, and there’s an entire school of thought that holds markets run in secular patterns that average 17 years.

“Secular bear and bull markets average 17 years in length,” Cravens Brothers analyst Jason Leach wrote recently in his report “Sleepwalking Toward a Precipice.” If that’s so, then what we’re currently calling a bull market is a bull market within a larger bear market. Which would most likely mean, uh, kids, that stocks will be going down again.

Going by this notion, if a bear market started in 2000, then it’s got a few more years to run until a new long-term bull market starts. There’s something to that, really, when you think about how much further the recovery has to go, when you consider that even the Fed doesn’t see the nation returning to full employment for several more years, when you consider that Europe is a long way from any kind of real resolution.

What you get over the long term is something like this: 2000-2017 (?), bear market; 1982-2000, bull market; 1966-1982, etcetera, etcetera, more or less all the way back to 1929.

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